Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I'm guilty as charged... I do the note pad paste a few times a day.
Here is a neat trick. When you are in Word (or WordMail in Outlook), select a bunch of text and enter control-space. This will clear the formatting and set it to the default style. However, it's a bit buggy because some times it thinks the default style is Times New Roman rather than Verdana or Calibri. This is probably due to some legacy code from when I was in diapers.
I guess this is an example of software trying to do too much. Most of the time when I cut-and-paste, I just want the text, not the formatting. I know the software is trying to do the right thing, but I usually don't trust it anyway. When I paste from Word to Powerpoint, say, I have little faith that the data is really the way it appears. Even if it LOOKS right, I'm suspicious that there is some magic code embedded in there such that when I do something unexpected (like, say, hit delete at the end of the previous line) the whole thing is going to turn purple. Yes, I know Ctrl-space is supposed to remove formatting, but I don't really believe that either. And I don't want to hunt around for the little icon with paste options, only to find that it is not offering "Paste text only" as an option. So I do the "notepad paste". You probably know what I mean. You run notepad, copy the data in the first app, paste it into notepad, reselect it in notepad, and paste that into the other app. It works because notepad is so simple that all it provides in the source data is the text itself. So the paste operation automatically takes on the formatting, bulleting, fonting, etcing of the target document, which is what I want. It works perfectly every time. Hopefully the next version of Office will make it a goal to eliminate the notepad paste. If not, they should make it a standard keyboard shortcut. Ctrl-N could be "notepad paste". Ship it.
I guess this is an example of software trying to do too much. Most of the time when I cut-and-paste, I just want the text, not the formatting. I know the software is trying to do the right thing, but I usually don't trust it anyway. When I paste from Word to Powerpoint, say, I have little faith that the data is really the way it appears. Even if it LOOKS right, I'm suspicious that there is some magic code embedded in there such that when I do something unexpected (like, say, hit delete at the end of the previous line) the whole thing is going to turn purple. Yes, I know Ctrl-space is supposed to remove formatting, but I don't really believe that either. And I don't want to hunt around for the little icon with paste options, only to find that it is not offering "Paste text only" as an option.
So I do the "notepad paste". You probably know what I mean. You run notepad, copy the data in the first app, paste it into notepad, reselect it in notepad, and paste that into the other app. It works because notepad is so simple that all it provides in the source data is the text itself. So the paste operation automatically takes on the formatting, bulleting, fonting, etcing of the target document, which is what I want. It works perfectly every time.
Hopefully the next version of Office will make it a goal to eliminate the notepad paste. If not, they should make it a standard keyboard shortcut. Ctrl-N could be "notepad paste". Ship it.
Source: The Annoying Need for "Notepad Paste"